Barclays online banking services are mainly unavailable this morning.
Several customers emailed The Register to complain that, once again, they could not access their accounts.
A spokeswoman for Barclays confirmed there was a problem and promised us a call back when they knew what it was.
Either the bank has been plagued with …

When I tried to log on this morning

I was informed that online banking was "currently unavailable" but the page also had a "continue" button. I pressed the continue button and seemed to be in the online banking system with everything working perfectly. It will be interesting to see whether I have actually paid my credit card bill or not....

System Upgrades

I reckon it started going downhill when they phased out the OS/2-based ATMs for Windows-based ones. Apart from one glorious day when all OS/2 ATMs crashed, they were generally a lot more reliable. No doubt the desktops and servers have suffered the same fate.

another weekend upgrade failed

Ooops, looks like the changes they carried out at the weekend got screwed up. So much for testing changes befoer implementing them It also tells us that (this particular part of) Barclays don't have a disaster recovery plan that works

Eduardo runs Barclays?

Terrible bank

This bank is utterly shit, nothing works yet they charge the earth for services and pay little interest on "savings" accounts. they also use savings to gamble with their investment bank division whilst slashing the support in the bank. Time to break up the banks.

Mr Grumpy Says

Their online banking is pants. Usually you get 'idle logout' messages in the middle of trying to do something (e.g. Pay your tax bill) important. Then sit on hold & get told by some off shore 'support' centre that nothing is wrong and it's all you fault. I tried logging complains, and all you get is platitudes... Gee... Sorry you had a problem. Love & kisses... The bank.

Thing is... Who is better? It's not like they have a lot of competition is it?

Problems again for me too

Smile? Not really..

@TempestX3

Smile were part of the Co-Op but Co-Op financial services (of which Smile is the public face) were or are in the process of being sold off to the Britannia Building Society, so they really are going to be no better than the rest.

The Co-operative Bank is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority (No. 121885), subscribes to the Banking Code, is a member of the Financial Ombudsman Service and is licensed by the Office of Fair Trading (No. 006110).

Aw - no access to the adverts.

I think they are a joke. The only reason I stay with them is my mortgage. Their recent revamp was a bit of tarting up and an excuse to shove adverts in our face. On my laptop when I log on I have to scroll the screen to see the 'Next' button and get past the first advert. When arrive at 'my' (ha ha) home page I have to scroll in order to see all my accounts because of another sodding advert.

That tells you all you need to know about Barclays. They clearly see me as a potential mark and looking after my money is of secondary importance.

Luckily my mortgage will all but gone next year so I can finally look around for a bank that has more respect for me. Anyone know of one?

Paris:Because she knows all about tarting up and is happy to be get the shaft.

Still Down

Barclays tried to save some money...........

By prematurely ending the contracts of a lot of contractors before the final hand over was complete on the ATM/Online banking projects leaving current barclays staff with no manuals or documentation as they where due to be written in the end stage of the project.

So each time it goes Pete Tong its a huge mess.

What they saved by shortening the contracts by 2 months is long gone in the time and cost to get these issues fixed.

As others say, if it wasnt for my mortgage I would be long gone, but I cant get a mortgage with an interest rate of 1.25% anywhere else!

Started to work...

Barclays & O2

Barclays is to banking what O2 is to mobile phone networks. All show and no go. All fart and no shit. Maybe they share IT consultants, it would explain why neither can maintain a reasonable service to their customers.

RBS is golden

I have never had a problem with the RBS Online banking system. Not once. I am an early adopter too.

How can banks claim that your money is safe with them if its held on unreliable systems. Lets face it money is just numbers on a computer nowadays and if they can't get their computers to behave then I would not trust them with my money.

Not a surprise

I have had a number of dealings with Barclays over the years as my company (I'm a contractor of 15 years) has been engaged to deliver a number of projects for them. They do seem very disorganised. They have too much beaucracy, put in place in a blunt attempt to reduce the number of unforeseen outages. However, this might be ok if they weren't also trying to reduce their cost base by laying off staff and putting in place completely unrealistic project timescales (I mean why if something like testing should take 2 weeks say do they allow just 2 days in the plan and then refuse to move on it) . The end result of all this cost cutting and beaucracy are projects that fail to deliver(services like online banking) , stressed out staff (a lot of some really good staff with invaluable knowledge have moved on) and of course low morale. I doubt that those with the power to change things this will consider doing anything as their bonuses are based on headcount and cost cutting, not necessarily on performance, etc. As such, I doubt that this will be the last outage at Barlcays we read about here.....

Nationwide down a lot too

It is nice to know that my bank Nationwide is not the only one unable to provide a consistent service.

The Nationwide home banking system has been going down regularly for many hours at a time over the last month.

The system lets you log in, but when you click on the account you wish to manage it fails. So you log out, then when you reload the front page and try to log in it shows you your accounts along with their balances even though you have logged out. Quite worrying!!

When you ring them up they say they are aware of the problem but can give no time for fixing. The worst thing is that they don't suspend the service while they are working on it so the only way to find out if the system is operational is to log in again. You then find the system still does not work This repeated logging in is a security risk in itself, especially for a system that can't seem to log out.

I should have expected more from Nationwide but then these are the same people that print their customer number (used as part of the login process) on the envelope or card in mailings.

What a bunch of bloody amateurs, we all know systems go wrong from time to time, but the least they can do is put up a maintenance page.

Barclays online banking

Not only did Barclays online banking take a dive on the 7th September, on both that day and the 6th September it stopped sending payments by the Faster Payments System. Even phoning up their so-called helpline was useless as they could say why or even whn it would be able to do so again. All they could do was to tell me that the payment was not going via FPS.